THE COP WHO WAS A RAPIST AND A KILLER

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There are thousands of cops who commit crimes and/or abuse the people they have arrested in the United States and Canada.

In 35 states in the USA, there are no laws that expressly define all forms of sex between police officers and detainees as being non-consensual. However, Rape by police officers is illegal in most of  all the states and yet, in February 2018, two recently published articles led to claims that 35 states allowed police officers to rape women being held in custody.

The articles stemmed from the case of a New York City teenager who had accused two officers of handcuffing her and taking turns raping her in a police van.  Anna said the detectives took turns raping her in the backseat as the van cruised the dark streets and as she sat handcuffed, crying and repeatedly telling them “No.” Between assaults, she said, the van pulled over so the cops could switch drivers. Less than an hour later, a few minutes’ drive from where it all began, the detectives dropped Anna off on the side of the road, a quarter-mile from a police station, surveillance footage shows.

But Anna didn’t know that in New York State, there is no law specifically stating that it is illegal for police officers or sheriff’s deputies in the field to have sex with someone in their custody. It is one of 35 states where armed law enforcement officers can evade sexual assault charges by claiming that such an encounter — from groping to intercourse — was consensual  even though the sexual   encounters were actually  rapes. 

If a cop in Canada raped a woman who is in the custody of a police officer, that cop would be spending several years in prison. I think that also applies in other states in the USA.

Years ago, a prostitute in Toronto whom I knew as a friend told me about a Toronto cop who would go to her apartment to rape her and as long as she let him do it, he wouldn’t charge her with prostitution.

One day she decided to put an end to his sexual visits. She told him to put his revolver on the kitchen table instead of on her bedroom dresser. While he was raping her, a friend of hers (as prearranged)  slipped  into the  kitchen and took the revolver  and left the building with it. I don’t know how the cop explained losing his  gun but  he never returned to the woman’s apartment again.

Police brutality is the use of excessive and/or unnecessary force by personnel affiliated with law enforcement duties when dealing with suspects and civilians. The term is also applied to abuses by corrections personnel in municipal, state and federal penal facilities including military prisons. Highly publicized incidents of police misconduct have adverse effects not only on the victims of abuse but also on public perceptions of the police departments implicated in the incident; The magnitude and longevity of such effects have rarely been investigated.

While the term police brutality is usually applied in the context of causing physical harm to a person, it may also involve psychological harm through the use of intimidation tactics beyond the scope of officially sanctioned police procedure. In the past, those who engaged in police brutality may have acted with the implicit approval of the local legal system, e.g. during the Civil Rights Movement era. In the modern era, individuals who engage in police brutality may do so with the tacit approval of their superiors or they may be rogue officers. In either case, they may perpetrate their actions under color of law and, more often than not, engage in a subsequent cover-up of their illegal activity.

Efforts to combat police brutality focus on various aspects of the police subculture, and the aberrant psychology which may manifest itself when individuals are placed in a position of absolute authority over others. Specific suggestions for how to decrease the occurrence of police brutality include body cameras and civilian review boards. and small camera on the uniforms  of the police officers in Canada. This  reduces  the number of abuses by police officers.

Many years ago in the last century, suspects were horribly abused by Toronto police officers. That doesn’t occur nowadays.

The worst occurrence of police brutality took place in New York City.  Abner Louima who was born on November 24. 1966 in Haiti. He was assaulted, brutalized, and sexually abused in 1997 by officers of the New York City Police Department after he was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub. The police officers beat him, squeezed his testicles and forced a broken broom handle up his bum.  His injuries were so severe as to require three major surgeries. At first the police attempted to cover up the attack.

The officers who brutalized their victim were sent to prison and their victim was given over a million dollars as restitution.

Generally police do not use torture. It’s highly illegal and any information extracted by that method would not be admissible in court anyway. And the torture victim can then file lawsuits against the police agency and officers who did it. And any officer accused would be investigated and most likely lose their job. That’s on local, state and normal federal level legal matters. Prisoners of ‘war’ and people taken into custody under things like the Patriot Act fall into a more grey area where the use of torture is still under debate.

Any form of torture by anyone in Canada is punishable with imprisonment .Therefor police don’t use  torture to get confessions from suspects.

Police officers in the US shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, according to the FBI’s very limited data  far more than other developed countries like the UK, Japan, Canada and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.

One explanation is that Americans are much more likely to own guns than their peers around the world. This means that conflicts not just between police and civilians but between civilians are more likely to escalate into deadly, violent encounters.

Now I am going to tell you about a real nasty cop who not only raped little  girls, he also killed one of them.

 James Duckett, the police officer convicted in 1988 of raping and killing an 11-year-old girl, was heading back to a Lake County courtroom. Duckett’s attorney, Elizabeth Wells, and Assistant State Attorney Pete Magrino met with Circuit Judge William Law to continue the legal battle that has been raging since a fisherman found Teresa McAbee’s body in a lake the morning after her disappearance. Duckett was a rookie Mascotte police officer at the time of her murder.

Around 10:00 p.m., eleven-year-old Teresa McAbee walked to a convenience store to purchase a pencil and, after leaving the store, she stopped to talk to a sixteen-year-old boy outside the store. 

Duckett arrived at the convenience store shortly afterward and, after asking the store clerk the age of McAbee, he approached McAbee and the boy.  After a brief conversation, Duckett told McAbee to go home, leaving the boy to wait for his uncle.  When the boy’s uncle arrived, the boy and his uncle witnessed McAbee getting into the passenger side of Duckett’s patrol car.

At 11:00 p.m., McAbee’s mother walked to the convenience store, looking for her daughter.  The store clerk told the mother that McAbee had left with Duckett and was probably at the Mascotte police station.

When no one was found at the Mascotte police station, the girl’s mother drove to nearby Groveland police station, where she reported her daughter missing.  The Groveland police officer contacted a Mascotte police officer, and Duckett arrived at the Groveland police station within twenty minutes.  Duckett used a picture of McAbee to make a flyer that he said he would post at convenience stores in the area, however, he failed to do so.

Teresa’s mother reported the girl missing at midnight on May 12, 1987. Her body was found the next morning, just south of the town that was home to about 1,600 people at that time.

The store clerk reported that the police drove by the store every hour, but she reported that Duckett came by at 9:30 p.m. but did not return for a few hours.  Additionally, Duckett made no radio calls between 9:50 p.m. and 12:10 a.m. that was because he was raping the girl.

The next morning, McAbee’s body was found in a lake less than one mile from the convenience store where she was last seen.  Medical testimony demonstrated that she was sexually assaulted while alive and then drowned.  Blood and a pubic hair, later identified as probable matches to Duckett, were found in her underpants and semen was found on her jeans.

Distinct tire tracks found at the scene were matched to the tires found on the Mascotte Police Department patrol cars.  Duckett’s and McAbee’s fingerprints were found on the hood of the car, indicating that she was sitting backwards and later laying down on the hood of the car while he was raping her.

Duckett was arrested and charged sexual assault  and with her murder.  He was convicted of sexual assault and her murder and the jury voted 8 to 4 for his execution. 

Among his post-conviction appeals is the fact that a jury did not unanimously recommend his death sentence. A key U.S. Supreme Court decision recently forced Florida to change its law, giving jurors the power to decide and not a judge   and also requiring 12-0ther recommendations.

After finding Duckett guilty of sexual assault and first-degree murder, the Lake jury recommended death by an 8-4 vote. 

In the Supreme Court, Duckett again attacked the work of an FBI hair expert who testified that there was a “high degree of probability” that a hair found in the girl’s underwear was that of Duckett’s.

Duckett’s lawyer cited a 2011 independent analysis of Michael Malone’s work which concluded that he had overstated the accuracy of hair analysis and that his notes did not match his testimony. However, he also testified correctly that the hair was not consistent with other people she had been in contact with. He also testified that hair analysis is not as precise as fingerprint analysis.

The court ruled that Duckett’s lawyer could not show that the testimony was false. Also, the case did not hang on the hair evidence. Teresa’s fingerprints were found on the hood of Duckett’s patrol car, for example, and Duckett testified that she had not sat on his car which was an obvious lie since her fingerprints were on the hood of the car.

There were also tire tracks at the lake that matched his patrol car .Duckett’s lawyer  also  raised issues in a 2014 Department of Justice review that concluded that some of Malone’s statements “exceeded the limits of science and were, therefore, invalid.”

Duckett’s lawyer   failed to prove that the review would have made any difference. Not only that, but Malone’s “testimony was challenged extensively at trial,” the court noted.

Duckett’s explanation was that he saw and talked with the child who had gone to a convenience store to get a pencil to do her homework. And Duckett says that he drove around Knight Lake looking for Teresa after her mother summoned police when the girl didn’t return home from her 10 p.m. trip to the store.

A pregnant teen told deputies months later that on the night of the murder, she saw Duckett drive away with Teresa in his car. Later, she recanted her fakse testimony. Her testimony just muddied the waters.

The single pubic hair found in Teresa's panties was the sole piece of critical physical evidence. The FBI expert testified that it was “completely indistinguishable” from one of 30 samples taken from Duckett.

However, the Justice Department’s inspector general later nailed agent Michael Malone for lying on the witness stand and for submitting scientifically flawed reports in 18 high-profile cases, including O.J. Simpson’s, the Oklahoma City bombing and the case of John Hinckley, who shot President Ronald Reagan.

The Justice Department notified prosecutors in 263 Florida cases — Duckett's included that Malone had done shoddy work, misrepresented evidence and in some cases lied. Prosecutors could decide on their own whether to revisit convictions. Lake’s prosecutor decided not to reconsider previous convictions.

The FBI has released a 309-page report detailing why FBI analysts overstated the cases.

At the heart of the controversy, they said, are the words “consistent with,” as in “these hairs are consistent with” those taken from the suspect, when the more accurate phrasing should be that the hairs “could have come” from the suspect.

Because the FBI and its analysts didn’t want to admit being wrong and enjoyed the praise of prosecutors after a conviction, they bolstered the importance of their testimony by trying to inject statistical measures, such as, ‘I’ve examined more than 10,000 hair samples and so far have not found two individuals that I have not been unable to distinguish one from another."  That is pure exaggeration.  Thank heaven for DNA, which came into use in 1999.

Questions about her death and Duckett’s conviction have lingered ever since. This FBI report is just more fuel to re-examine what was a sloppily-investigated case.

Duckett filed a Direct Appeal with the Florida Supreme Court, citing the following trial court errors:  circumstantial evidence did not exclude all reasonable hypotheses of innocence, admitting testimony of the three girls who said that Duckettt raped them  also qualifying a state witness as an expert in hair analysis, and imposition of the death penalty.  The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentence. Then Duckett filed a 3.850 Motion Appeal with the Florida Supreme Court, raising the following issues: ineffective assistance of counsel; failing to present exculpatory evidence, including DNA evidence; prosecutorial misconduct; applying vague aggravating circumstances; and improper jury instructions.  On October 6^th 2005, the Court affirmed its denial of his motion.

on: In January 2000, the Florida Legislature passed legislation that allows lethal injection as an alternative method of execution in Florida. Florida administers executions by lethal injection or electric chair at the execution chamber located at Florida State Prison

In 1972, I was invited to tour that prison. During my private tour, I sat on the electric chair and talked to the deputy warden about that particular method of executions in Florida. I was able to get off that wooden chair on my own volition which is more than could be said about Ted Bundy, the serial rapist and killer who sat on that chair on January 24^th 1989 when and where he was executed.